Jerre D. Noe, 1923-2005: He led UW's first computer program

Head of team that made electronic banking a reality

By JENNIFER LANGSTON, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, November 13, 2005

Jerre D. Noe, who pioneered electronic banking in the 1950s and was the first chairman of the University of Washington's computer science and engineering department, died Saturday after a brief battle with cancer. He was 82.

When Noe was picked to lead the university's first computer science group in 1968, it was little more than a dozen electrical engineering graduate students looking for someone to teach them.

He transformed it into one of the country's top computer science programs by sticking to two principles: Always hire the smartest people in the room and encourage them to work collaboratively, said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in computer science and engineering at the UW.

Some Oregon Residents Upset at Prospect of Pumping Their Own GasBuzz 60

Doug Baldwin playcallingBy Michael-Shawn Dugar, SeattlePI

Van Crashes Into Pedestrians Injuring SixAssociated Press

US military to accept transgender recruits after Trump drops appealEuronews

Snow on Christmas Eve, 2017Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ice carving at WinterfestSeattle Post-Intelligencer

Amtrak derails near OlympiaGrant Hindsley / SeattlePI

Golden retriever meets Darth Vader and EwokSeattle Post-Intelligencer

Seattle's tunnel project, 2017 in reviewWSDOT

Hillary Clinton Book Signing Capitol HillSeattle Post-Intelligencer

"He was temperamentally wonderful -- he's a person who takes no credit for himself and gives it to others," said Lazowska, who later followed Noe in heading the department.

Among Noe's many accomplishments was leading a team at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1950s that pioneered computerized banking.

Before that time, banks closed in the afternoon to process the day's transactions by hand. Checks were mailed across the country, and the increasing number of people opening bank accounts after World War II was threatening to overwhelm that system, according to a history of the project published by SRI International.

At the time, computers were used largely for scientific calculations, not business functions. Over the course of five years, Noe and his team developed machines that could process checks and enable money to be transferred electronically.

"They had to build all this stuff from scratch. They had to build their own computers," Lazowska said. "This really enabled personal checking and electronic banking as we know it today ... one of the legacies of this project are those illegible numbers at the bottom of your checks."

But Noe, who retired from the UW in 1989, was hardly single-minded. He played the flute in the Ballard Breeze quintet, skied voraciously and sailed. As he was approaching 80, he trekked more than 90 miles through the Basque region of Spain.

His son Russell, who teaches mechanical engineering at the UW, said he was sleeping in his father's library this weekend and was stunned at the diversity of books there.

"He had a huge bandwidth of interest, and we were looking at all the pictures on the wall, and he's always beaming. He was one of those people that even though he had a doctor title, I never heard him use it. He was incredibly down to earth."

Noe is survived by his second wife, Margarete; sons Russell Noe of Seattle and Jeff Noe of Denton, Texas; daughter Sherill Roberts of McMinnville, Ore.; and five grandchildren. Memorial services are pending.